Are you a startup company that’s looking to grow its online presence? Do you want to build a passive marketing funnel that can help your brand reach more people? If so, then you need to learn all you can about designing a website for a business the right way.
Think of the website as the nucleus of your digital marketing plan. It’s where people will go at every stage of the customer value journey to engage, invest, and support your brand.
See below for an in-depth guide listing several tips you should integrate when you’re building a website for your company.
- Plan Your Website
Before you get going on the schematics of your website, you need to have a plan. Something that you can refer back to and understand the primary goal of the site, what you’re looking to build, and (more importantly) what it can become in the future.
Trust us, when you go to do things like building your website with your hosting service, there will be a lot of tools thrown in your face. It’s easy to derail yourself from your site. Stick to your guns, young entrepreneur!
For example, let’s say that you want to build a website that can generate leads for your law firm. If so, then your law firm’s website might contain things like a blog to answer questions, a breakdown of the different fields of expertise you have, an about us page, and so forth.
First, what are you hoping to accomplish with your website? Who is the type of people that you’re targeting? In other words: who is your target market?
Second, what tools can your website develop to help your customers? What needs can your services answer for them? How can your website connect the dots between the client’s biggest pain points and your services being the solution?
- Find a Great Website Host
If this is your first time creating a website, then you probably have a lot of questions. How does someone build a website from nothing? Where do you go to make one? How do you get the website address that you’re hoping for?
Don’t worry, dear friend; we’ve got you covered! All of these questions can be answered the same way: through a website host.
A web hosting service (AKA web host) is a service that provides all of the necessary tools and resources for you to create, design, and run your website. Without the host, your only other option would be to hire a web designer, which can cost a lot of money.
There are many website hosting services out there that are dedicated to small business website hosting and helping you grow your brand. Such hosting services include SiteGround, HostGator, BlueHost, Weebly, Kinsta, and more.
Website hosting services aren’t to be confused with website builders like WordPress, Wix.com, or Squarespace, which are solely focused on helping you create the site. Website hosts use website builders for their customers.
For example, if you invest in BlueHost then you will, by default, invest in WordPress—the website builder that BlueHosts uses. Make sense?
- Prioritize Mobile-Friendliness
This may shock you, but more people are visiting the internet via a smartphone than any other device combined. More than desktops and tablets put together!
For that reason, you want to shift your focus; the layout of your website on a desktop is certainly still important, but the layout of your site on a phone screen is even more so. If it doesn’t fit perfectly on a smartphone, your site visitors will click the back button faster than you can say “website host”.
Fortunately, many website builders (such as WordPress) automatically create a mobile version of your site based on the template and content you place on the desktop version. That said, you always want to triple-check to ensure the content fits just as well on that version of the website.
- Think of SEO First
What’s just as important as prioritizing a mobile-friendly site is thinking about the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your website as well.
In other words, would Google approve of your site? If not, then it can spell doom for your website’s success. Always think of different ways you can make your site more Google-friendly so that the world’s largest search engine will push your pages to its users.
Such methods include:
- Making your website mobile-friendly
- Performing keyword research and prioritizing those on your pages
- Making a website that downloads quickly
- Backlinking to your website and other reputable sources
- Make Strong Content
Content is king these days. You can have the most beautiful website in the world, but it’s nothing without valuable content. After all, what’s bringing site visitors to the website in the first place?
But what content should you create? That all stems from the question we asked in the first step: what are your customer’s biggest pain points and how do your products/services solve them?
There are many types of content you can use on your website to answer those pain points such as blog articles, how-to videos, downloadable PDFs, services pages, infographics, slide shows, and more.
Designing a Website for Business: Capitalize on These Tips
Now that you have seen an in-depth guide on designing a website for a business and everything that it entails, be sure to use this information to your advantage.
Take the time to browse our website for more articles on creating a small business website, as well as many other topics you will find interesting.
